Louis Baraguey d'Hilliers

Louis Baraguey d'Hilliers (13 August 1764-6 January 1813) was a general of the French Army of the First French Empire during the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars.

Biography
Louis Baraguey d'Hilliers was born on 13 August 1764 to a minor noble family in Paris, Kingdom of France. At the start of the French Revolutionary Wars, he decided to remain in France and joined the French Revolutionary Army. In 1793 he became the aide-de-camp to Adam Philippe de Custine and a Brigadier-General after the Siege of Mainz, and he was arrested alongside Custine during the Reign of Terror. Baraguey was spared from the guillotine unlike hisw commander, and he returned to service after the fall of the Jacobin Club in 1794. In 1796 he put down a revolt in Paris, although he was briefly arrested out of fear that he was a royalist.

He was later sent to join Louis Hoche's army and served as the Governor of Lombardy under General Napoleon Bonaparte in 1796 during his Italian Campaign. In the Battle of Rivoli, he commanded a brigade under General Gabriel Venance Rey and was made General de Division in 1797, becoming the governor of the occupied Republic of Venice. In 1798 he was captured by the Royal Navy after Napoleon's capture of Malta from the Knights of St. John, and after his release he was acquitted in a court martial. In 1800 he fought under Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr in the Battle of Stockach in the War of the Second Coalition, the second of the French Revolutionary Wars.

In 1801, Baraguey d'Hilliers was appointed as Inspector-General of Infantry and in 1804 he became Colonel-General of Dragoons. In 1805, he served under Marshal Michel Ney at the Battle of Elchingen in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1808, he was made Governor of Venice once more after the French occupied the Austrian city in 1805. From 1810 to 1812 he fought in Spain and he fought in the Patriotic War against the Russian Empire in 1812. His army was ordered to withdraw from Smolensk when Napoleon ordered the retreat from Moscow, but he advanced into the jaws of the Russian army and one of his brigades surrendered on 9 November 1812. Baraguey d'Hilliers fell into disgrace with the emperor because of this, and he died in 1813 in Berlin.